A Slash employee accidentally burned $81,000 on AI tokens while creating a meme shooter — and it paid off.
Fintech startup Slash, valued at $1.4 billion, received an unexpected lesson in managing artificial intelligence expenses. One of its employees, Director of Strategic Verticals Nicolas Brianté, spent over $81,000 on AI tokens in a single week while developing a meme game called Brainrot Shooter. The trigger was an internal call for the company to use AI more actively for writing code — and Brianté took it literally.
He dedicated an entire day to working with Anthropic's Claude model, creating a shooter with characters like Skibidi Toilet and Tung Tung Tung Sahur. However, by his own admission, he underestimated how quickly token consumption accumulates when repeatedly loading the entire codebase context. Each query to the model consumes tokens, and over the day, the total grew to tens of thousands of dollars. The final bill for the week amounted to $81,267.
From Accident to Strategy
Brianté himself called the incident a "real accident," and the company Slash responded with humor. In a post on X, startup representatives joked that employees should play the game so it could be written off as marketing expenses. However, to everyone's surprise, the project gained unexpected popularity.
In the first 48 hours, 6,912 people played Brainrot Shooter. Total playtime amounted to 8,986 hours, with an average session per player of 1.3 hours. The peak number of concurrent gamers reached 437. Moreover, the company received three incoming advertising placement requests. The finance department promptly reclassified the project from an "expense incident" to a strategic initiative.
Slash is not the only company to encounter this in practice. Earlier this year, Uber exhausted its annual AI budget in just four months, after which it introduced its own limits. Another unnamed company received a $500 million bill for one month of using Anthropic's Claude, without setting any restrictions for employees.
My expert opinion: This case is a perfect example of how a lack of control over AI spending can lead to financial shock, but it also demonstrates that even an "accidental" project can achieve viral success. Companies should implement clear limits on token consumption, while still leaving room for creative experiments — as these often yield unexpected dividends.